The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because ? unlike many leftists ? they understand exactly what this war is about. They understand that U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the cold war. They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched ? a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.